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#toys You can now purchase a $30 replica of the star of Valve's Meet the Pyro video. That's right, not the Pyro itself: the Balloonicorn, nature's most majestic and impractical animal. More »

Liked Balloonicorn so much in the Pyromania Update that you'd like to take him home with you? Because Balloonicorn could really use a place to crash at for a bit (one, two weeks max), he's going through a bit of a rough patch right now. Also, you totally won't even know he's there. Hey, look, also, could you pick Balloonicorn up some smokes on the way home? He's good for it, he's just waiting to get some money wired to him. Available through ThinkGeek and the Valve Store.

While you're at the Valve Store, check out all the other cool new TF stuff that we just got in.

An update to Team Fortress 2 has been released. The update will be applied automatically when you restart Team Fortress 2. The major changes include:

• Added sd_doomsday to the mapcycle files
• Fixed exploit that allowed Beggar's Bazooka to indefinitely hold rockets in the chamber without misfiring
• Fixed hatless hats not not-drawing correctly
• Fixed bugs with The Hitman’s Heatmaker
  • Headshot kills now properly decapitate
  • Bodyshot damage penalty is properly applied
  • Fixed sound issues while in focus
• Fixed missing DX8 particle effects
• Fixed seeing through Sniper fences in 2Fort when using Pyrovision
• Fixed the second style for the Robot Chicken hat
• Teddy Roosebelt can now get assist credits
• Updated sd_doomsday:
  • Players can now fall into the launch pad after the rocket lifts off
  • Optimized some prop_dynamics to reduce server hitching
  • Engineers can no longer build teleporters behind the spawn
  • Players will no longer get pushed through the terrain if the elevator falls on them
  • Death pits now kill dead ringer Spies
  • Lowered the frequency of announcer lines

An update to Team Fortress 2 has been released. The update will be applied automatically when you restart Team Fortress 2. The major changes include:

• Added sd_doomsday to the mapcycle files
  
• Fixed exploit that allowed Beggar's Bazooka to indefinitely hold rockets in the chamber without misfiring
  
• Fixed hatless hats not not-drawing correctly
  
• Fixed bugs with The Hitmans Heatmaker
  • Headshot kills now properly decapitate
    
  • Bodyshot damage penalty is properly applied
    
  • Fixed sound issues while in focus
• Fixed missing DX8 particle effects
  
• Fixed seeing through Sniper fences in 2Fort when using Pyrovision
  
• Fixed the second style for the Robot Chicken hat
  
• Teddy Roosebelt can now get assist credits
  
• Updated sd_doomsday:
  • Players can now fall into the launch pad after the rocket lifts off
    
  • Optimized some prop_dynamics to reduce server hitching
    
  • Engineers can no longer build teleporters behind the spawn
    
  • Players will no longer get pushed through the terrain if the elevator falls on them
    
  • Death pits now kill dead ringer Spies
    
  • Lowered the frequency of announcer lines

STOP: If you haven’t watched Meet The Pyro yet, watch it, for goodness sake.

This morning I found myself grumbling in RPS chat about how news sites were casually spoiling the twist in the Meet The Pyro video, by posting pictures of it. Now I am going to do exactly the same thing, because you really should take a look at the Pyrovision goggles in action. Anyone who logs into the game between now and next week gets a set of goggles that mods the game world to look a bit like the Pyro’s view of things, including shooting rainbows, balloon-gib deaths, and floating pink plushie unicorn. There are some videos of it in action, below.(more…)

Everyone, I have some regrettable news: I woke up this morning with the sudden realization that – in my heart of hearts – my truest wish has always been to lead a life of megalomaniacal supervillainy. So, incredibly long and spellbindingly interesting story short, I’ve wired the entire world to explode. Unless! You can tell me – without glancing about one nanometer below this sentence – what’s come of the Team Fortress team-up between Adult Swim and Valve. Mwahahaha, I can smell your fea– yeah, it’s a hat. Well, damn. I guess I’ll just go back to writing about videogames, then.

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Valve's in-house movie-making machine, the Source Filmmaker, is now available to the public in beta form. Source Filmmaker is the tool Valve uses to create its own films, including the "Meet the" series for Team Fortress 2: Valve teased the Source Filmmaker at the end of today's long-awaited, disturbingly depressing "Meet the Pyro" video.

The Source Filmmaker can make a movie out of any game running on the Source engine, Valve writes in the tool's introductory post.

"Because the SFM uses the same assets as the game, anything that exists in the game can be used in the movie, and vice versa. By utilizing the hardware rendering power of a modern gaming PC, the SFM allows storytellers to work in a what-you-see-is-what-you-get environment so they can iterate in the context of what it will feel like for the final audience."

Interested amateur directors can sign up for the Source Filmmaker beta right here and "start shooting your movie on location inside the world of TF2 today."

The third and final day of Pyromania is here, and the update is now live! New new items! New achievements! A new game mode! Pyrovision! Bongos! It's all live right now!

Updates to Team Fortress 2, Day of Defeat: Source and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:
Source Engine Changes (TF2, DoD:S, HL2:DM)

• Added ConVars sv_rcon_maxpacketsize and sv_rcon_maxpacketbans to allow server admins to control the maximum RCON packet size and whether or not users get banned for exceeding that limit. The defaults reflect the existing behavior.
• Fixed not being able to import custom spray images on Macs
• Fixed Macs cancelling http map downloads that take longer than 30 seconds

Team Fortress 2

• Added Pyrovision!
• Added new game mode Special Delivery and map Doomsday!
• Friendly players glow when carrying the flag
• Fixed rare cases where flag could fall out of the world
• Fixed cases where the Payload HUD looked like the cart is still on a hill when it isn't
• Fixed cases where some clients didn't receive broadcasts about long continuous particle effects being started or stopped
• Updated the HTML renderer for displaying server MOTD
• Votes created by a dedicated server no longer trigger a failed vote cooldown
• Fixed map triggered annotation events not working on dedicated servers
• Fixed the game crashing if tempents are created that use invalid materials
• Using a Name Tag while in game notifies everyone of the name change
• Fixed Strange Part: Projectiles Reflected not tracking grenade and sentry rocket deflections
• Added new items
  • City on Fire item sets
  • Pyroland weapons and cosmetics
  • Community-contributed cosmetic items for all classes
  • Mysterious treasures have been incinerated, but are now craftable
  • Added crafting recipe for Pile of Ash
  • Scorched Keys are now available in the store for a limited time
  • New promo item
• Weapon balancing changes
  • Gloves of Running Urgently
    • Removed self-damage over time penalty
    • Heavy takes mini-crits while active and for 3 seconds after switching away
    • Attack damage penalty reduced from -50% to -25%
  • Tomislav
    • Spin-up speed bonus reduced from +40% to +10%
  • Quick-Fix
    • Medic mirrors blast jump of their heal target
  • Crusader's Crossbow
    • Reload speed time reduced by +40%
  • Cozy Camper
    • Regenerates 1 heath per second
    • Reduced movement penalty from -90% to -80%
  • Sticky Jumper and Rocket Jumper
    • Added 'flying' sound to blast jumps
  • The Concheror
    • Changed rage building source from "damage done and damage received" to only "damage done"
    • Increased the rate at which Rage builds for this item by +25%
  • The Equalizer
    • Removed player move speed modification and added it to a new item named The Escape Plan
    • All owners of the Equalizer will be automatically granted The Escape Plan
  • Crit-a-Cola
    • Added +25% increased movement speed while active
    • Increased duration from 6 to 8 seconds
  • Atomic Bonk
    • Increased duration from 6 to 8 seconds
  • All Flamethrowers
    • Increased base damage by +10%.
  • Backburner
    • Removed +10% damage bonus attribute
    • Note: Because of base damage increase, damage remains unchanged
  • Degreaser
    • Added -10% damage penalty attribute
    • Note: Because of base damage increase, damage remains unchanged
  • Phlogistinator
    • Damage defense while taunting reduced from -90% to -75%
• Item bug fixes
  • Fixed sentry sometimes spawning in shielded mode while the Wrangler was equipped, but not deployed
  • Improved visual and audio cues for when the Manmelter is ready to fire
  • Fixed Manmelter being able to earn crits via friendly Pyro self-damage
  • Fixed Scotch Bonnet's blue team skin not showing
  • Fixed Unarmed Combat's taunt not working
  • Unarmed Combat's color now matches the team using it
  • Fixed the Apparition's Aspect showing a burning texture in DX8

When Valve and Adult Swim announced a partnership involving the Team Fortress 2 universe, we winked at each other, throwing out the tired joke that it would probably just be a bunch of hats. Today, we're not sure if we should be laughing or weeping silently into our keyboards: Adult Swim has revealed a free, limited-edition Robot Chicken hat for any class in TF2, as the first iteration in a series of new stuff coming from Valve and Adult Swim.

To get the Robot Chicken hat, just sign up for the Adult Swim newsletter by July 4.

In related, not-completely-predictable news, the FAQ for redeeming the Robot Chicken hat asks and answers an intriguing question: Q. Are you making a Team Fortress cartoon?
A. Make sure you're signed up to receive at least one Adult Swim newsletter.As long as it's not called "The Hatsure Brothers" or any variation thereof, an Adult Swim Team Fortress 2 cartoon sounds like something we could get behind.

In still-related, by-now-old news, Valve launched the "Meet the Pyro" video and announced the Source Filmmaker movie-creating tool today.

...is here!

Also! Because today's new items contain some Meet the Pyro spoilers, we're gonna hold off on announcing those until the update’s ready later today.

But! We are announcing something else RIGHT NOW: The beta release of the Source Filmmaker, the tool we use internally to make all of our "Meet the Team" shorts. You can check it out here.

The final introductory video for Team Fortress 2 has been released; watch above as the other classes guess what kind of motivation lies beneath the Pyro's stoic demeanor. It turns out he's just a misunderstood psychotic killer!

Today is the third and final day in Valve's Pyromania promotion, culminating in the video above but also bringing new content to the free-to-play shooter. Yesterday saw the addition of Teufort, a new map plagued by raging methane fires, and several new weapons: the Scout gets a new pistol and shotgun, the Sniper gets a new SMG and sniper rifle, the Soldier has a new bazooka and the Pyro gets himself a flare gun, which "knocks back target on hit and ignites enemies in a small radius."

Valve finally gets around to letting us know what's up with the Pyro, and it's pretty messed up!

#teamfortress Meet the Sandvich, a San Diego Comic-Con exclusive piece of Team Fortress 2 history. ThreeA Toys' masterful creation is so limited you'll have to make an appointment to buy it. More »

#teamfortress A trio of heroes armed with powerful new weapons against the man (or woman) that would burn everything they've built to the ground. Day Two of Team Fortress 2's Pyromania update has me feeling the drama. I mean hell, just look at that still from "Meet the Pyro" up top. Oh yeah, I'm feeling it. More »

At the end of the day, the Pyromania update is a celebration—not just of Team Fortress, but more importantly of you, the TF community, and even more importantly than that, of us, the TF blog post writers, and how great yesterday's blog post was. That Men Without Hats material was a career high. In fact, we decided to never touch this blog again in the hope that it might be preserved in a perfect state for future generations.

We're not sure why Valve's economist is concerned with the finances of prestigious Covenant Elites in Halo, but the first publication from Yanis Varoufakis on Valve Economics is about exactly that. Only he spelled "Arbiter" wrong like 20 times.

Oh, he's talking about "Arbitrage," the practice of capitalizing on the price difference between two or more markets, and its place in the Team Fortress 2 economy. That makes more sense, barely, but between the specialized equations and graphs Varoufakis offers some plain insight into the world of digital economies.

For example, Varoufakis calls the TF2 barter economy "peculiarly sophisticated," noting that Steam's support system allows players to side-step the introduction of currency, operating solely on a "double coincidence of wants." This is something that civilizations for centuries have not been able to support for any protracted period of time, and its complexity is the reason we now have money, rather than things to trade with.

The isolated nature of digital economies lends itself to intriguing happenings such as that one, as Varoufakis explains in great detail, we assume because he's thrilled to be able to calculate the exchange rates of laser guns and hats rather than boring old dollars and cents.

TF2Maps.net is putting on another level design contest to create a King of the Hill map that is designed around the Highlander style of play. STAR, an active community member, put them up to it and sponsored the contest along with some fun prizes. All the details and rules are available on the TF2Maps.net site.

The Pyro is finally getting his own "Meet the Team" short here in the next few days, so to celebrate Valve is trickling out three days of update goodies for Team Fortress 2. Valve is calling it the Pyromania update, three days of content additions to the now-free-to-play shooter.

First up today is Doomsday, a new map and corresponding game mode where one team attempts to deliver a suitcase nuke to a waiting rocket while the other team attempts to stop them. This new map and game mode brings with it a whole slew of new achievements to unlock - tomorrow and the next day we'll learn more about this Pyromania update as Valve unlocks even more new content in Team Fortress 2.

#teamfortress Team Fortress 2 fans will finally "Meet the Pyro" in "less than three days," according to the official blog for Valve's popular multiplayer game. (A countdown clock seems to place the debut at 2pm ET this Wednesday.) This may tie into Valve's tease last week that it was teaming up with the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim for... something. More »

So, that Valve/Adult Swim collaboration. As many speculated, it will be the Meet the Pyro video and, yes, ‘will be’. It was foolish of us to think that the video would just appear without any foreplay, so instead there’s the image above, which tells us that something else will happen on June 27th. I’m guessing that actually will be the video, unless they choose to release one frame every couple of days, some hidden at secret locations around the world, the precise position hidden in Morse code messages transmitted on secret websites that can only be found by reading tea leaves through a specific kaleidoscope constructed in 1924.

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Mmmmph mmmmph, mmmmm mmmmmp mmmmmph. Mmmmmph mpm! Mmmmmph mph mm! Hm mmmmmph, hmmmmph mm mmmmmph mmmmmph!

Ready for something to come out of nowhere and hit you right in the nose? OK, here it comes. Get ready, brace yourself, and… it still hit you. Because that’s how things that defy the law of conservation of energy to suddenly materialize on our plane of existence work. I believe a more succinct term for it is “surprise.” Anyway! Turns out, it’s an announcement – as things we report on often are. Something Valve-related is making its way to famed purveyor of cartoons with curse words, Adult Swim. But what could it be? WHAT?

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#teamfortress2 Yanis Varoufakis, the economist Valve recently hired to study Team Fortress 2's virtual economy, has published his first paper. If you are not an economist and suffer from insomnia, you might consider giving this a close read. More »

Valve and Adult Swim have come together in a glorious union of witticism, snark and something else that they're not telling us until next week. Adult Swim has a promo page decked out in Team Fortress 2 images and hashtags, and it promises this partnership will beget "something that you'll probably enjoy."

The surprise is "coming next week," with more information to be disseminated in the newsletter, apparently. Clicking "Sign Up" leads to a registration page with this image of TF2's Pyro, who is due for a "Meet the" feature from Valve any time now.

Valve is running a summer ARG at the moment that may be connected to this Adult Swim deal, or it might just be another thing that Valve may never finish.

Can't really make it out, but it sounds like we might finally get a "Meet the Pyro" video soon. [TeamFortress.com] More »

#blip Valve, the people who make Team Fortress 2, and Adult Swim, the beloved block of Cartoon Network shows for grown-ups, are teaming up for something TF2-related. It's happening next week. That's all we know! Fail to learn much more here. More »

Cam Fortress doesn't really "do" anything, but it does let you pretend to sneak up on someone on the subway platform with your Spy switchblade drawn, or carry Pyro's flamethrower to a gas station. Developed and launched on Google Play for Android phones, Cam Fortress launched last week, and is free to download. More »